Abstract
During the eight months preceding the 2019 parliamentary election in Poland, resolutions aimed against the LGBTQIAP minority were adopted by over 60 out of 2,477 municipalities. They were proposed by a local right-wing organization called Ordo Iuris. Based on the prerequisites from the political opportunity structure approach, I test two sets of explanations as to why certain municipalities were targeted by the organization, while others were not. One set of hypotheses is associated with social demand; municipalities chosen by Ordo Iuris are expected to be more religious and supportive of the political right. The other approach assumes that the activity of the organization was determined by the resources available in the community, such as high percentage of members of the local council representing the right-wing Law and Justice party, electoral turnout, membership in religious organizations, and population density. The empirical analysis confirms the significance of resources and disproves the argument associated with social demand. The study has implications for understanding how the social movements of the radical right gain political influence in Eastern European countries. It shows that they do not serve a particular demand from the society for the worldview they represent, but they rather rely on the aid from political elites and the resources provided by them and the community to promote their agenda where they can.
Introduction
On 18 December 2019, the European Parliament passed a resolution in which it urged the European Commission to “condemn all public acts of discrimination against LGBTI 1 people, notably the development of the so-called ‘LGBTI-free zones’ in Poland.” 2 Those “zones” have been established in sixty-seven municipalities (pl. gminy) and cities, thirty-three counties (pl. powiaty), and four voivodeships in Poland between March and October 2019 by means of approving anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions by local councils. All those resolutions contained an appraisal of the so-called “traditional” family model based on a marriage of a cis-man and a cis-woman, and demanded that the rights of such families be prioritized over others. Some directly condemned the so-called “LGBT ideology.” The organization responsible for lobbying for these resolutions is the foundation called Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture (commonly referred to as “Ordo Iuris”). The Members of the European Parliament took notice of the resolutions in question after being convinced by Polish LGBTQIAP activists about both the ambiguous and discriminatory nature of these legal acts. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) took the motion to the floor of the European Parliament because they considered the resolutions contradictive to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. 3
The scapegoating of the LGBTQIAP community in Poland continued during the 2020 presidential campaign. During a television broadcast, Jacek Żalek, an MP of a right-wing party called Agreement, said that “the LGBT . . . are not people, it’s an ideology.” 4 On the following day, the dictum was picked up by the incumbent president of Poland Andrzej Duda during his campaign rally in Brzeg, 5 putting the LGBTQIAP into the spotlight until the very election day. The Polish government also used the references to LGBTQIAP rights as a negotiation tool in November 2020, when the EU included respecting the rule of law principles as a requirement for being eligible for the Union’s funds in the bill of the common budget. Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Paweł Jabłoński, who used to work as an analyst for Ordo Iuris, 6 accused the EU institutions of threatening Poland that a failure to implement the “LGBTQ+ strategy” would result in retracting the money. 7
The sources of the political salience of the issues related to LGBTQIAP persons’ rights in Poland in 2019 can be attributed to numerous political developments. In early 2019, the newly elected President of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski signed a charter supporting rights for LGBTQIAP persons, fulfilling his electoral pledge from 2018. The initiatives put forward by Ordo Iuris were meant as a response to that charter. Furthermore, in February 2019, a new political party called Spring was established in order to compete in the European Parliament and in the Polish parliamentary elections in May and October 2019, respectively. The party leader Robert Biedroń, previously the president of the City of Słupsk (and a popular one, which is a worthy subject for another analysis in the context of the country’s political “landscapes”), continues to be the most well-known and noted openly gay politician in Poland. The party was quickly gaining recognizability and support in the polls in the early months of 2019 due to Biedroń’s personal charisma and people-oriented attitude. 8 His media presence and the fact that his party won 6.06 percent votes and three seats in the EP 9 contributed to the public visibility of LGBTQIAP-related issues embodied by Biedroń himself. It was also one of the results of numerous pride events taking place across Poland. Some of them sparked and had to face violent countermanifestations, for example, on 20 July 2019, in Białystok. 10 The presence of LGBTQIAP persons in the public space encountered backlash from the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. Archbishop Marek Jędraszewski used the expression “rainbow plague” in August 2019. 11 This utterance was followed by laying information against the archbishop in the context of suspicion of committing a crime, but the prosecutor’s office refused to initiate a formal investigation. Other bishops expressed their support for Jędraszewski’s point of view, 12 although they did not openly state their support for anti-LGBTQIAP initiatives proposed by Ordo Iuris. 13 In a similar fashion, the anti-LGBTQIAP discourse was also echoed by representatives of the Roman Catholic Church during the 2020 presidential campaign. 14
This study focuses on the selection of municipalities in which Ordo Iuris promoted the introduction of anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions condemned by the European Parliament. As an organization with limited financial resources and no local offices, it needed to carefully choose a local council to target with its resolution proposals in order to increase the chance of successful lobbying. Poland is a country with a sound civil society, 15 but its rates of civic participation are lower than the average across European countries. 16 As a result, Poland does not constitute a particularly affable environment for organizations attempting to promote local political initiatives. Moreover, the efforts to promote and introduce anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions constitute a distinct set of actions recorded by the local media as well as processed and documented by municipality councils. This enables the researcher to study the activity of the organization that would otherwise be difficult to grasp due to the variety of actions that the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) pursue and their informal nature. The spread of anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions in Poland presents an opportunity to conduct a study uncovering the necessary conditions for social movements to act in countries with low levels of civic engagement.
Based on the prerequisites of the political opportunity structure approach, I propose two explanations of the strategy employed by the organization. The first one links lobbying for an anti-LGBTQIAP resolution with the social demand for a resolution from the community. I expect that municipalities that are more inclined to develop anti-LGBTQIAP sentiment and thus constitute fertile ground to promote an anti-LGBTQIAP resolution are those characterized by higher religiosity and higher percentage of votes for Law and Justice (the dominant right-wing party in Poland) in the previous parliamentary election and those which witnessed a recent LGBTQIAP pride event.
An alternative explanation considers the resources available to Ordo Iuris as the main factor influencing proposing an anti-LGBTQIAP resolution in the local council. In this study, I limit my interest to the municipal level, as it provides the highest number of cases belonging to a single administrative level to analyze—2,477. An organization without any local branches should have difficulties accessing the floor of the local authorities unless they get help from the leaders of the community. I argue that a higher share of seats held by the right-wing parties and males, and higher average age of the councilors increase the chances of receiving support by Ordo Iuris. Help can also come from religious organizations. The stronger these organizations, the greater the chance of them aiding in lobbying for the resolution. The same should be true for high electoral turnout as a general indicator of civic activity and population density, which is a sign of spatial proximity and higher intensity of interactions among the members of the community.
I test these expectations using a dataset combining social and political information about Polish municipalities. This initial dataset has been expanded with information on the resolutions meticulously gathered by the creators of atlasnienawisci.pl, who had kindly shared their data with me before they were published online. The study encompasses the attempts of introducing a resolution by Ordo Iuris regardless of whether it was successful, which is why I do not differentiate between the municipalities that introduced or rejected the resolution, or merely hosted events associated with the initiative. The ones included in the analysis were observed before the parliamentary election in Poland on 25 October 2019. The justification for limiting the scope of the study to this particular period can be found in the “Data and Variables” section of this article.
The results of the data analysis lead one to reject the hypotheses associated with social demand. There is no evidence that religiosity, voting for Law and Justice, or occurrence of a local LGBTQIAP pride event matters for Ordo Iuris when they decide to target a certain municipality with propositions. However, there is strong support for some of the hypotheses related to the availability of resources facilitating the activity of the organization. The greater the share of the seats in the local council controlled by Law and Justice and the higher the civic engagement measured by electoral turnout, the higher the probability of the anti-LGBTQIAP resolution being proposed in a municipality. Social activity in religious organizations exerts a statistically significant influence on the phenomenon only when the turnout is high, too. A positive influence of population density has also been detected.
The results of this case study of the activity of the anti-LGBTQIAP movement in Poland have important implications for organizations and activists who work on ensuring respect for the rights of sexual minorities in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. The general conclusion is that anti-LGBTQIAP associations cannot operate without significant aid from political elites, such as elected officials who give them floor access in legislative assemblies, or forces associated with the Catholic Church. Also, numerous social correlates of anti-LGBTQIAP sentiments are of no value for explaining the activity of those movements. This means that their actions are a matter of strategies employed for political gain, not a response to social demand.
The article is structured in the following manner. First, I discuss the existing research on anti-LGBTQIAP legislation around the world. Next, I introduce Ordo Iuris as the principal actor, whose actions I studied. Then, I formulate the hypotheses explaining the organization’s activity as to promoting the municipal-level anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions in the Polish social and political context. The subsequent section showcases methods of data analysis employed in the study by discussing the data collection, scope, and variables. This will be followed by the data analysis itself. In the penultimate part of the article, I provide robustness tests for the detected dependencies. The final part concludes the results and discusses possible implications.
Examples of Anti-LGBTQIAP Legislation and Legal Initiatives around the World
Legislation institutionalizing discriminatory practices against LGBTQIAP persons at the subnational level is not a phenomenon limited to Poland, as the introductory part of this article might have suggested. In the United States, two hundred attempts were made in between 1974 and 2008 at the local level to limit or reverse the legal provision for protecting the rights of LGBTQIAP citizens. 17 Burnett and Salka 18 explored the determinants of support for constitutional amendments banning marriage equality. Their study established that county-wide support for the Republican Party—as well as lower income and education levels—is associated with support for marriage equality bans. The objective of those constitutional amendments was narrow, that is, they were targeted at limiting the access to a certain category of rights, and their introduction was subject of a direct decision of the local community, which sets them apart from the initiatives studied in this article. 19
A different kind of anti-LGBTQIAP measures was introduced in Russia in 2013. The new laws—first at the local level and then nationwide—criminalized disseminating positive information about sexual orientations and identities other than cis-heterosexuality. The Venice Commission 20 commented that “the laws are designed to ensure that ‘non-traditional’ (that is, non-heterosexual and non-heteronormative) sexual relationships are understood to be socially inferior.” 21 The introduction of the so-called “anti-homopropaganda” reflects the state’s increasingly active support for pronatalist and paternalist policies to promote “traditional family values.” 22 Their introduction is also seen by scholars as a Russian “manifestation of independence from the Western pressures.” 23 Similar measures were supported by the Hungarian parliament and announced by the Vice Minister of Justice of Poland Michał Woś in June 2021. 24 Laws of this kind can be interpreted as attempts to dehumanize LGBTQIAP persons in the eyes of the general public and eradicate their activism from the public domain. Apart from the obvious consequences of the legislation for the safety of LGBTQIAP persons and the freedom of speech, the scholarly community has noted its influence on the health of LGBTQIAP persons due to its imposing limits on the actual access to the diagnosis and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. 25 Similar discriminatory laws had been introduced in Nigeria and Uganda. They explicitly ban same-sex marriages and violate the freedom of assembly, speech, and association of persons belonging to sexual minorities. 26 The resolutions introduced at the local level in Poland, which remain in the focus of this article, are similar to the measures introduced in Russia and Hungary. Their main objective, as demonstrated in “The Resolutions” section of this article, is to limit the visibility of sexual minorities by preventing access to science-based sex education, limiting the opportunities for the LGBTQIAP movement, and promoting so-called “family values” which, in fact, exclude several categories of actual families.
Even more extreme forms of discrimination are experienced by LGBTQIAP persons in numerous countries in the Middle East, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean, which continue to criminalize same-sex relations. The most extreme examples of such laws exist in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, where consensual intercourse between two men is punishable by death. 27
Explaining the Anti-LGBTQIAP Movement Activity in Poland
Although Poland has not introduced any countrywide legislation against LGBTQIAP persons, it does not possess institutionalized means to protect the rights of the minority. Poland has no law regarding civil unions or regulations of legal gender recognition for transgender persons. Physical violence and police brutality against LGBTQIAP persons are considered a serious and escalating problem by the representatives of the LGBTQIAP movement. 28 Further information on the legal and social situation of LGBTQIAP persons in Poland can be found in a report published by the International Federation for Human Rights. 29
All of the anti-LGBTQIAP initiatives that were discussed, passed, or rejected in 2019 in Polish municipalities and studied in this article were initially proposed by Ordo Iuris—an organization founded in 2013 and retaining a status of a foundation. Its official goals include “promoting a legal culture based on respect for human dignity and rights.” 30 It intervenes and provides support in cases prosecuted by the Polish Supreme Court, the European Committee of Social Rights, and the European Court of Human Rights. It declares its opposition to “various radical ideologies” that question the current social order and “seek to destroy its very foundation.” 31 These include promoting the acceptance of LGBTQIAP persons and their rights. The organization has two offices (in Warsaw and Brussels) and no local branches. Their website features seventeen members of the council, but no data about rank-and-file membership are available. The organization shares its own analyses, reports, and statements online and publishes a journal. It organizes conferences and discussions that often reinforce the policies introduced by the Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro, the leader of a more radical and nationalistic coalition partner of Law and Justice, namely, Solidary Poland, 32 while preserving the guise of independence. The set of routine activities listed suggests that the organization has a very limited ability to operate outside of the media and courts. Proposing projects similar to the resolutions studied in this article was not among its standard practices before 2019.
Ordo Iuris is linked to Agenda Europe—a transnational network of organizations whose lobbying efforts focus on preventing the expansion of sexual and reproductive rights (SRR) 33 —and to the Tradition, Family, Property (TFP) movement. 34 Agenda Europe is a network that provides strategic know-how with regard to the successful lobbying of anti-SRR postulates in the EU. The TFP has a worldwide scope and alleged links to activists and financial resources in Brazil or Mexico. Ordo Iuris is considered to be an important actor in providing funding for the TFP. According to existing research, the activity of these transnational groups has proven to be effective in Eastern Europe. 35 There are a number of organizations linked to the TFP and Agenda Europe in European countries, for example, “Society and Values is Association” 36 and “Freedom for All” in Bulgaria, 37 “Ordo Iuris” 38 in Croatia, and “Nova Terrae” in Italy. 39 All of them represent similar objectives to the ones listed on the website of the Polish Ordo Iuris. While these transnational links are important for understanding the functioning of Ordo Iuris as an organization, they do not facilitate the comprehension of the strategies employed with regard to the promotion of anti-LGBTQIAP initiatives in Polish municipalities. From the perspective of Ordo Iuris, these transnational ties can be considered important sources of know-how from countries where anti-LGBTQIAP initiatives are also being undertaken. 40
The Resolutions
Before theorizing the targeting of municipalities with the bills of anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions by Ordo Iuris, I shall briefly describe their content. 41 There are two main types of resolution bills: the Local Government Charter on Family Rights and the Declaration Against the LGBT Ideology. The former contains a set of recommendations about preferential treatment of the “traditional” family model in public schools and is up to six pages long. Any cooperation of a school with an external organization should be subject to acceptance by the parents, and a detailed program of the course offered by the organization should be submitted for scrutiny. The document does not explicitly refer to the LGBTQIAP minorities, but its aim of protecting the family model comprising only a man, a woman, and their children is explicitly stated, which is why it excludes single-parent families and a variety of other models. The anti-LGBTQIAP profile of the Charter is sometimes declared in the act that introduces it as a local law. The main text of the Charter also refers to the necessity to protect children from the influence of “various ideologies,” which is clear in the context of Poland in 2019, where the concept of “the LGBT ideology” was in widespread use in the right-leaning media. It also recommends a set of “good practices” of screening any publicly funded projects for any “anti-family” objectives. This affects the opportunities of NGOs providing sexual education workshops, as their access to schools has been limited.
The latter document consists of only two pages of text. It directly refers to the so-called “LGBT ideology” and condemns “radicals who endeavor for a cultural revolution” and “attack the freedom of speech, the innocence of children, the authority of the family and the school, and the freedom of entrepreneurs.” It strongly opposes enforcing any kind of “political correctness” and introducing any information about non-heterosexual relationships to the teaching programs in public schools, even if this is in accordance with the recommendations of the World Health Organization.
The full texts of the resolutions introduced in each of the municipalities can be found online at atlasnienawisci.pl. The wording of the resolutions varies slightly across municipalities, but the objective of stopping initiatives targeted at promoting the rights of LGBTQIAP persons remains the same.
According to atlasnienawisci.pl, the typical lobbying activities in which Ordo Iuris engaged in order to promote the bills included the following: (1) organizing meetings and conferences in the municipality to present the initiative and convince the local authorities of the danger posed by the “LGBT ideology” to the local community; and (2) submitting written petitions to introduce the bill to the local municipality council. These measures usually result in either placing the bill of the resolution before the council or at least a public declaration made by a group of local councilors even if the resolution did not reach the stage of formal proceedings. The actions that Ordo Iuris undertook need to be performed in the municipality itself and, therefore, required physical presence of the representatives of an organization. Ordo Iuris was sometimes aided in these endeavors by organizations such as Centrum Życia i Rodziny (The Center for Life and Family), Ruch 4 Marca (The 4th March Movement), and Fundacja Mamy i Taty (The Mum and Dad Foundation), but it was always Ordo Iuris that led the initiative.
The Theoretical Framework
In this attempt to understand the determinants of the strategies of Ordo Iuris associated with lobbying for anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions, I employ the political opportunity structure approach used to explain the activities of social movements as conjunctions of “collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities.” 42 Its origins can be found in the works of Eisinger 43 and McAdam, 44 who studied the determinants of activity of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. They emphasize the significance of both the openness of local governments to the postulates and activities of social movements and the demographic characteristics of the community. Further developments of the approach lead one to a definition of the political opportunity structure, that is, “consistent—but not necessarily formal or permanent—dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations for success or failure.” 45 The basic premise of the approach is that “exogenous factors enhance or inhibit prospects for mobilization, for particular sorts of claims to be advanced rather than others, for particular strategies of influence to be exercised, and for movements to affect mainstream institutional politics and policy.” 46 According to Meyer and Minkoff, 47 the main aim of the approach is to explain “periodicity, style, and content of activist claims over time and variance across institutional contexts.” The authors also emphasize that the openness of the polity to social movements does not vary simply across the targeted communities, but it is also issue-specific, that is, some resources are only available to certain initiatives.
To set a framework for the choices faced by Ordo Iuris, I propose a simple matrix of two dimensions. The first one distinguishes the demand for their postulates and the resources available in the community. The second refers to the actors with whom the organization interacts in order to reach its objectives. For the purposes of this study, I differentiate between the political elites of the local community, which include mostly the elected members of the municipality council, and the wider society. The distinction is based on the premise that while the social distance between the political elites and the ordinary citizens can be short at the level of a small municipality, their interests in regard to politics can differ, which matters for their perspective on the initiatives studied in this article. While the citizens and the elites share the need to express their interests and political attitudes, and have them represented in local government, the local councilors also care about their chances of staying in office and expanding their party’s influence. Thus, they wish to emphasize those issues that help their party set the agenda of a nationwide electoral campaign. 48
The logic behind this assumption relies on the multilevel structure of political parties as organizations. 49 From the point of view of the central party authorities, local party offices are agents working for the party to advance its position, which includes emphasizing issues important for the nationwide agenda within the local context. The national party can then reward them with positions in the administration when it wins an election. 50 While local rank-and-file party members can influence the party by voting in internal elections and voicing local interests to the central party organization, the increasing role of media and financial resources—as well as the strong position of the party leaders—imposes a subordinate position on local party organizations. As a nationwide result, local politicians serve the needs of the central party organizations whenever needed. This asymmetric relationship between the central organization of the party and its local offices strengthens the discrepancies between the attitudes of the local politicians and the electorate, as politicians need to be more concerned about the priorities of the central party organization than the matters important to the local community.
The purposes that local party offices serve the national party is a contextual factor playing a significant role in explaining the emergence of the anti-LGBTQIAP resolution phenomenon, since Ordo Iuris began its campaign to promote them approximately eight months before the parliamentary election set for October 2019. These actions facilitated the transmission of the issue of LGBTQIAP rights—which remains in the domain of the central government in Poland—to the level of the local government. The issue also played a role in the campaign preceding the European Parliament elections in May 2019, as the anti-LGBTQIAP sentiments that Law and Justice and its partners represent remain in contradiction to anti-discriminatory policies of the EU, which generally tends to protect minorities. This is often framed in the right-wing discourse as a “foreign influence” that should be opposed.
Cooperation with the Local Elites
The members of the municipality council control the crucial resources for the resolutions to be passed into law. Their support for the initiative depends on their party affiliation and individual inclinations toward certain attitudes regarding sexual minorities. Party affiliation represents ideology and links local activists to nationwide party organizations. Poland in 2019 expected a parliamentary election which was set on 13 October. Thus, parties focused on setting up an agenda that would help them gain votes. 51 As the dominant mainstream party representing the religious right, Law and Justice opposes any recognition of the rights of LGBTQIAP persons, which is why it is a palpable ally of Ordo Iuris. Both the elevated salience of anti-LGBTQIAP stances and the emergence of the idea of passing municipality-level resolutions during the campaign were a political response to the charter supporting LGBTQIAP rights signed by the President of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski in early 2019. During the campaign, the councilors representing Law and Justice could use the resolutions to promote their own party’s nationwide agenda. The greater their control over the local council, the greater the chance of passing the proposed bill and controlling resources important to Ordo Iuris. Local councilors could aid the organization by renting conference rooms for their events and putting the bill up to a vote in the council. This leads to the first hypothesis of the study:
The ongoing electoral campaign and the need of the governing party to promote its agenda can also be considered as the crucial factor influencing the choice of arena in which Ordo Iuris decided to operate. Under the existing circumstances, the local councilors from Law and Justice were natural allies for the initiative. Proposing a resolution they could pass to showcase their devotion to the ideas it presents exploited the opportunities very well. 52 Moreover, cooperating with Ordo Iuris helped the party appear responsive to the postulates from NGOs and the wider society.
Other characteristics of the councilors, such as age and gender, can also play a part in their willingness to support the efforts of Ordo Iuris. Having been raised before the LGBTQIAP persons and their rights having gained attention and at least partial recognition around the world, older councilors are expected to be less sensitive to their problems and thus more inclined to cooperate in promoting an anti-LGBTQIAP resolution. 53 The same can be expected of men compared to women. The former are less exposed to discrimination at work and in public life, or to sexual harassment, which makes them less sympathetic to the needs of minorities. Also, women have been found to be more empathic toward other people, 54 which should make them less inclined to support discriminatory ideas. This leads to the following two hypotheses:
The hypotheses formulated so far are linked to the characteristics of local political elites. H1 covers both the demand and the resource side of the opportunity structure, which are inseparable at this level of analysis, while H2 and H3 focus on the demand behind the attitudinal predispositions of certain sociodemographic categories of councilors.
The Social Demand
I proceed to the determinants associated with anti-LGBTQIAP sentiments among the general public. Unfortunately, direct indicators of these attitudes are not available at the regional level in Poland, which is why I turn to variables that can approximate them. Three factors are taken into account. The first one is the level of religiosity. Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion in Poland, and its representatives condemn sexual relations between persons of the same sex, deny their rights to marry and adopt children, and preach against the possibility of legal gender recognition. 55 These postulates, just like abortion, are considered symbols of social change and are resisted by religious people. 56 Thus, I propose that the greater the percentage of religious people in a community, the more prevalent the anti-LGBTQIAP attitudes should be.
An expectation similar to the one described in the previous paragraph can be formulated with regard to the second correlate of anti-LGBTQIAP attitudes, namely, the level of support for Law and Justice. The party openly opposes granting LGBTQIAP persons any rights that would protect them from violence or discrimination based on their sexual identity or orientation. 57 They also reject the postulates regarding marriage equality or laws easing the procedures of legal gender reassignment. 58 The greater the support for the party in the community, the greater the popularity of anti-LGBTQIAP attitudes should be.
The third and final variable that is sometimes considered as a factor contributing to the spread of anti-LGBTQIAP attitudes is whether the community witnessed an LGBTQIAP pride event. In 2019, in Poland there were twenty-seven such events, while there were only fourteen in 2018, which makes for a significant rise. 59 While popular across Western democracies, these events are still deemed controversial in Poland and are often resisted by verbally and physically violent countermanifestations. Bishin et al. have demonstrated that greater protection of rights of LGBTQIAP persons does not cause a conservative backlash even in social categories that would be particularly inclined to it. 60 However, the authors did not research the possible rise of activity of movements opposing the LGBTQIAP postulates resulting from pride events. The argument that pride events do more harm than good to the struggle for the rights of LGBTQIAP people—as they allegedly “provoke” the general public by their eccentricity—is formulated within the LGBTQIAP community itself. 61 Thus, in order to contribute to this debate, this study tests the relationship between pride events and countermovement activity, although there does not seem to be much theoretical support for the hypothesis. 62
With regard to the factors underlying the potential demand for anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions in a community, I propose the following hypotheses:
The Resources of the Local Community
McCarthy and Zald disagree with the assumption that underlies H4–H6, namely that the existence of certain social grievances is necessary for a movement to develop and function. 63 The authors side with Turner and Killian, who argue “that there is always enough discontent in any society to supply the grass-roots support for a movement if the movement is effectively organized and has at its disposal the power and resources of some established elite group.” 64 This turns the attention toward civic activity which Ordo Iuris can use to its advantage. 65
The density of social and organizational networks is a factor known to influence the activity of social movements. 66 The most propitious conditions for the existence of the latter can be found in urban environments due to their higher population density compared with rural areas. Knudsen and Clark “contend that the physical accessibility characteristic of dense, diverse, walkable cities enables a social accessibility to a variety of ideas, actions, and happenings.” 67 People living in close proximity form social relations and can work together to promote shared ideas. Also, dwellings consisting of large numbers of people make it possible for ideas shared by small minorities to gain enough support in absolute numbers to get organized and represented. There is, simply, a larger base from which to draw. 68
Another factor that can help any social movement in organizing within a community is the political activity of its members. People who are more interested in politics and willing to engage in political action also ought to be inclined to help a social movement in its efforts. Electoral turnout is a universal indicator of such an activity. Data on turnout are available for each of the 2,477 municipalities in Poland, which is why it fits best the primary unit of analysis of the study.
The final variable that influences the conditions in which a social movement such as Ordo Iuris operates on the local level is the organizational strength of religious groups. They can provide important resources needed for lobbying for anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions, such as contacts to influential local figures, priests, and like-minded members of the local council. They provide rank-and-file supporters.
These considerations about the resources available in the community lead to the following set of hypotheses:
All the formulated hypotheses expect unconditional dependencies; they do not suggest any interactive effects that could be derived from the theory. However, the nature of these relationships can be more complex. Thus, multiplicative and curvilinear relationships ought to be tested as well.
The Summary of the Hypotheses
The theoretical argument can be summarized as follows. The decision made by Ordo Iuris about lobbying for an anti-LGBTQIAP resolution in a municipality depends on the social demand for expressing views presented in the resolution and the resources available for the organization in that community, which results from the political opportunity structure approach. At the elite level, the most important determinant is the support of the members of the local council, whose affiliation with Law and Justice, gender, and age make them inclined toward promoting anti-LGBTQIAP sentiments during the ongoing electoral campaign. At the societal level, I expect population density, electoral turnout, and participation in religious organizations to influence the strategy chosen by Ordo Iuris. A secondary yet noticeable role can be played by the moral conservatism of the community, linked to its religiosity, and electoral support for Law and Justice, as well as being exposed to an LGBTQIAP pride event, all of which cause a countermovement to mobilize.
Data and Variables
The empirical data for the study were collected in three stages. First, a dataset including social, economic, and demographic characteristics of 2,477 Polish municipalities was obtained from the Local Data Bank, which is Poland’s largest database of the economy, society, and the environment. 69 This initial dataset was supplemented by information from the National Electoral Commission of Poland on the results of the 2015 parliamentary and 2018 local elections. Finally, the anti-LGBTQIAP initiatives were coded at municipal, county, and voivodeship levels by the creators of atlasnienawisci.pl. Their purpose was to document any signs of activity of the anti-LGBT movement for the purpose of counteracting it, which ensures the completeness of the data gathered. At the same time, coding activity without collecting proper documentation to back it up would not only lead to diminishing the usefulness of the data for the sake of the movement but also expose it to the accusation of slander from the municipalities in question. Each of the anti-LGBTQIAP initiatives included in the dataset was documented through press reports or protocols from council proceedings; the relevant information can be found on the atlasnienawisci.pl website. These incentives ensure the reliability of the data. They encompass the period beginning with the first resolution, proposed in March 2019, until the last initiative that emerged before the parliamentary election on 25 October 2019. The set of initiatives has been limited to this period with the aim to enable studying the link between the strategy of the social movement and the interests of the local councilors from Law and Justice. Another important reason for restricting the studied period is that atlasnienawisci.pl was made available online on 29 November 2019. As a result, the anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions in Poland gained attention from the media and were submitted for a plenary discussion at the European Parliament. Suggestions were made that municipalities introducing these resolutions should be deprived of EU funding due to the discriminatory practices they promote. 70 Also, their partner municipalities in Western Europe were informed about the resolution, which made some of them end the partnership. 71 This could have changed the incentive structure both for Ordo Iuris and for their main allies. Furthermore, after the information on the resolutions was made publicly available on atlasnienawisci.pl, on the one hand, Ordo Iuris’ lobbying efforts received support from prominent representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. 72 On the other hand, however, Ordo Iuris was criticized in liberal media that took an interest in this issue. 73 This could have also changed the incentive structure for their actions, although that period lies outside the scope of this study and as such remains a subject for a separate analysis.
Social, economic, and demographic indicators in the dataset have been assigned to three different levels of administrative units, depending on their availability. As a result, the data structure in this study encompasses three levels of observations. Level 1 comprises municipalities. These are clustered within counties, whose characteristics are coded as level 2 variables. The voivodeships are level 3 observations. Accounting for the data structure requires the use of multilevel modeling. The dependent variable is a dummy, which is why I employ logistic regression. It is worth noting that the number of level 3 observations is small. This undermines the assumption of the normality of the distribution of the variables associated with this level, and the results associated with them should be treated with caution.
Main Variables
The main dependent variable of the study is a dummy denoting whether Ordo Iuris has proposed an anti-LGBTQIAP resolution in the municipality. The variable does not distinguish between a successful initiative and merely an event promoting it and reported by the local media, as it represents attempts made by the organization rather than their effectiveness. The analysis is focused on the municipality level and does not take into account initiatives proposed at the level of counties and voivodeships. The scope has been limited for the sake of clarity; including all the administrative units would entail mixing the levels and using the same values of explanatory variables many times, leading to confusion rather than benefit. Also, the units of lower levels are legally independent in their decisions from the higher level, which is why there is no clear relationship between resolutions passed at each of these levels.
The following variables were taken from the National Electoral Commission of Poland: the percentage of votes received by Law and Justice in the parliamentary election in 2015, electoral turnout in the municipality in 2015, the percentage of the Law and Justice representatives, and men and women among the members of the municipality council elected in 2018 along with their mean age. 74
The percentage of persons who declare participation in religious services at the voivodeship level is used as an indicator of religiosity as an attitude of the community. It was collected using aggregated survey data from 2015, available in the Local Data Bank. To approximate the information on the strength of religious organizations, the percentage of respondents declaring membership or activity in such an organization is employed. 75
The population density was calculated through dividing the number of persons living in the municipality by its area. The values of the variable were further logged in order to account for the expectation that the strongest effect of the rise in density should be exerted when the density is low.
The information as to whether a municipality witnessed an LGBTQIAP pride event in 2019 was taken from Queer.pl, which can be considered a reliable source of information on LGBTQIAP-related events. 76 The value “1” was assigned to those municipalities in which a listed event was held. Others were coded as “0.” An event was coded regardless of whether it preceded or followed the emergence of an anti-LGBTQIAP initiative, as sometimes the latter was proposed in anticipation of the event. 77
Controls
The main control variable of the model denotes whether the municipality was an urban area—coded as “1”—or a rural or a mixed one—coded as “0.” It is included with the aim of testing whether the population density matters when the legal status of the municipality and its approximate size is controlled for. Other controls account for an alternative approach to understanding the social demand for anti-LGBTQIAP initiatives. It might be that the latter is driven by structural problems faced by the community, such as poverty, unemployment, crime, and low levels of education. Such issues are unevenly distributed across communities and constitute a great challenge for political leaders. This can result in attempts to divert the attention of the suffering citizens from those problems to fictious threats to their lifestyle, such as the emancipation of LGBTQIAP persons. Variables representing these factors were obtained from the Local Data Bank. Education is represented by the absolute difference between the nationwide average percentage of persons with higher education and the respective percentage in the voivodeship. Criminal offense rates per capita, unemployment rates, and logged average household incomes per member were all added to the dataset at the county level. All this depicts the Polish society in 2017 and 2018.
The availability of data on the main control variables has not limited the size of the dataset significantly. In the end, N1 = 2,477 municipalities located in all of N2 = 380 counties and cities in all N3 = 16 voivodeships were included in the main analysis. The descriptive statistics of the variables included in the analysis can be found in the appendix.
Data Analysis
The results of the estimation of the main Model 1, predicting the activity of Ordo Iuris, are presented in Table 1. It contains unstandardized logistic regression coefficients with corresponding standard errors. To ease the interpretation of the statistically significant results, I present the relevant odds ratios in the main text.
The Determinants of Ordo Iuris Proposing an Anti-LGBTQIAP Resolution in the Municipality
Source: Own calculations.
Note: Standard errors in parentheses are provided under the unstandardized logistic regression coefficients. The denotations of hypotheses in parentheses are provided next to the names of the associated variables.
p < .1. **p < .05. ***p < .01.
Only three coefficients in Model 1 are statistically significant at the p < .05 level. The percentage of local councilors belonging to Law and Justice in a municipality positively influences the likelihood that Ordo Iuris proposes an anti-LGBTQIAP initiative there. A percentage point rise of the variable leads to 8.14 times higher odds that the municipality is targeted by the organization with its lobbying efforts. This confirms H1. On the other hand, H2 and H3 are disproven as neither the gender nor the age of councilors matters for the strategy predicted by the model.
The indicators of the social demand for expressing anti-LGBTQIAP attitudes fail to reach the conventional levels of statistical significance. With regard to the influence of religiosity, voting for Law and Justice in 2015, and the occurrence of pride events, the respective H4, H5, and H6 have not been confirmed.
The third group of hypotheses is associated with social conditions in which the movement is bound to operate in a community. The influence of logged population density in a municipality is statistically significant (p < .05) and positive, which confirms the expectations regarding general preconditions for social movements to operate. A one-unit rise of the value of the variable translates into the odds of Ordo Iuris attempting to lobby an anti-LGBTQIAP resolution in the municipality rising 2.19 times. This confirms H7. The dependency exists when the legal—urban or other—status of a municipality is controlled for. (In an alternate specification of the model where population density is introduced to the model as a linear predictor, it remains insignificant, while the dummy denoting urban municipalities exerts the predicted influence at p < .005.) This result should not be interpreted as an indication that Ordo Iuris is more likely to propose anti-LGBTQIAP resolutions in the biggest Polish cities. In the analysis presented, each municipality is represented by a single unit of observation, which is why few large cities—such as Kraków or Gdańsk—matter in the sample as much as rural municipalities and medium-sized towns do. The result is thus driven by the latter.
The last variable with a statistically significant coefficient in Model 1 is the turnout in the last parliamentary election in 2015, indicating that a 1-percentage-point rise in electoral participation in the municipality leads to a 1.09 times rise of the odds that Ordo Iuris proposes a resolution. This confirms H8.
Model 1 does not allow one to confirm H9 about the unconditional influence of the level of participation in religious organizations in the society on the activity of Ordo Iuris.
However, the importance of this factor can be unveiled when accounting for the moderating effect of electoral turnout. Model 2 in Table 1 has been expanded by adding an interaction effect between the 2015 turnout in the municipality and the percentage of persons participating in religious organizations at the voivodeship level. The interaction effect is significant at .01 level. The plot in Figure 1 indicates that participation in religious organizations exerts a significant (p < .05) and positive impact on the dependent variable when the turnout is at least 55 percent, which is about 10 percent of municipalities in Poland. This suggests that religious associations play a quantitatively measurable and statistically significant role in the studied phenomenon only in a limited number of municipalities where the community is already active, as indicated by the level of turnout.
The effect of participation in religious groups on the probability of Ordo Iuris proposing an anti-LGBTI resolution in the municipality contingent upon the level of electoral turnout in 2015
The data analysis so far has confirmed the importance of the party affiliation of the local councilors and the resources available for social movements in the municipality for the strategic choice made by Ordo Iuris. The significance of the demand-side factors associated with the social level has been disproven.
Robustness Tests
The robustness of these results has been assessed by re-estimating the models using the “relogit” procedure in STATA, as suggested in King and Zeng, 78 for generating approximately unbiased and lower variance estimates of logit coefficients and their variance–covariance matrix by means of correcting for small samples and rare events. The test was performed due to the fact that 63 out of 2,477 observations were coded as “1” in the dependent variable, indicating that proposing an anti-LGBTQIAP initiative can be considered a “rare event.” The results of the re-estimation confirm the validity of the results associated with the percentage of councilors from Law and Justice and the logged population density. The penalized maximum likelihood logistic regression (“firthlogit” in STATA) also confirms both the results associated with those two variables and the dependency associated with the influence of the level of membership in religious organizations conditioned by electoral turnout. The limitations of these two methods of model re-estimation are associated with their inability to account for the three-level data structure. Thus, they cannot be treated as an entirely satisfactory robustness test. However, they enable some basic checks that confirm the main conclusions of the study.
Concluding Remarks and Implications
The article presents a quantitative study of the activity of the most prevalent and active anti-LGBTQIAP association in Poland. The analysis takes advantage of an opportunity created by the Ordo Iuris foundation, which undertook efforts to propose resolutions against the rights of LGBTQIAP persons to local councils during the campaigns preceding the 2019 elections in Poland. This initiative constitutes a unique opportunity to study factors influencing the strategic choice made by an association with a very limited membership base. The theoretical argument formulated in this article is based on the political opportunity structure approach. The actions of the organization are expected to be influenced by the resources available to it in the municipality and the potential demand for expressing anti-LGBTQIAP stances among local authorities and the general public. The study reveals that the resources play a significant role, while various indicators of demand do not facilitate understanding the strategic choice made by Ordo Iuris.
To propose an anti-LGBTQIAP resolution in a municipality, Ordo Iuris needs the cooperation of the members of the local council. The ones willing to cooperate can be identified by their party affiliation. The analyzed initiative began during electoral campaigns, in which Law and Justice promoted its position against the protection of rights of LGBTQIAP persons as one of the main topics of the campaign. Therefore, the resolutions proposed by Ordo Iuris provide the local rank-and-file activists of the party with an opportunity to demonstrate their devotion to promoting the party’s agenda. As a result, local councilors from Law and Justice and Ordo Iuris become allies and provide each other with means to obtain their goals. The party controls the agenda of the local council and the resources needed for the initiative to receive attention of the local community. Ordo Iuris has the bill of the resolution and the appearance of a movement representing civil society and the “voice of the people.” This close relationship between Law and Justice and Ordo Iuris makes it possible to understand why the lack of local structures and rank-and-file members can be functional for the latter. Ordo Iuris does not need members for grassroots activities, as it can easily reach for help to local activists of Law and Justice. For a disciplined organization that specializes in legal battles, its own rank-and-file members would likely constitute a burden rather than a resource, as they might want to have a say about the functioning of the organization. Internal discussions could jeopardize the achievement of its objectives in a rapidly changing strategic context. 79
Other factors influencing the choice of the municipality in which Ordo Iuris decides to promote a resolution are linked to the resources that can be utilized by the association. The rudimentary condition enabling people to contact each other directly and work for a movement of their choice is the achievement of a certain level of population density. The importance of this variable should be noted despite the growing significance of the Internet and online presence for any domain of contemporary life. The significance of the overall political engagement of the members of a community (measured by electoral turnout) as a resource for a social movement has also been confirmed in the course of this study. Furthermore, there is evidence that participation in religious organizations matters when a municipality is to be selected by Ordo Iuris, although its influence is restricted to areas where people are politically active.
These results imply that what carries the weight for understanding the activity of anti-LGBTQIAP organizations in a country such as Poland are the resources and the allies who can deliver them. They open opportunities for political actions. This is far from obvious and unambiguous. None of the indicators of the potential direct or indirect social demand plays any role in predicting which municipality is targeted by Ordo Iuris with an anti-LGBTQIAP resolution bill. The whole affair is driven by the political elites that use the only available resources to put forward the issue they need during an electoral campaign in order to control the agenda. What is more, it is significant, thought-provoking, and intriguing that six of the nine hypotheses do not seem to have been supported in the course of this study. This uncovers a whole new layer of interpretations to be tested, as it shows a certain unpredictability of the Polish social and political reality, contrary to how it has been perceived by many. In this light, the author of this article finds these somewhat subversive results satisfactory. For instance, the fact that neither gender nor age of the councilors is of any value shows that even the genuine inclinations to anti-LGBTQIAP sentiments among the local establishment are not substantial for the actions of the anti-LGBTQIAP countermovement, as their reasoning is strategic and not based on responsiveness to actual beliefs. This is exactly why this null result is, perhaps, more important than the detected significance of the links between Ordo Iuris and Law and Justice. The actions of the studied organization have nothing to do with satisfying the needs of the local communities to express their anti-LGBTQIAP sentiments and being represented as citizens. What matters is pure political interest and ease of operation in the municipality. I argue that this untypical lack of expected correlations can be indicative of how the popular image of Poland as politically regressive and missing the point of human-rights values ceases to be relevant, giving way to calculated agendas based on potentially intelligent—and dangerous—mind games. Needless to say, this situation also invites further research, perhaps at the intersection of political sociology and psychology.
All in all, this study contributes to the literature on social movements by showcasing the usefulness of the political opportunity structure approach. The results remain in line with the point of view represented by McCarthy and Zald as well as Turner and Killian. 80 They emphasize the significance of the available resources for understanding social movement activity while disregarding the influence of the social demand for expressing stances. In short, the political opportunity structure—which is what Ordo Iuris makes use of—comprises both sympathetic members of the municipality council and the organizational potential resulting from the political mobilization of the local community. Importantly, the mobilization stems from a relatively higher population density, electoral turnout, and participation in religious organizations.
This study also expands our knowledge about anti-LGBTQIAP legislation that is becoming more and more prevalent in countries where sexual minorities have never received proper legal recognition and protection. Moreover, the empirical results can be used by practitioners and activists of the movements protecting the rights of said minorities. It is likely that they already knew that the interests and actions of Law and Justice were aligned. The value of this study lies in providing them with evidence that the actions of Ordo Iuris are not linked to any actual attitudes of local communities, which is a compromising thing to say about an organization allegedly “promoting a legal culture based on respect for human dignity and rights.” 81
Understanding the actions undertaken by Ordo Iuris also helps to unveil the modes of operation of contemporary right-wing populist movements—how they penetrate political civic society and create the widespread impression that local communities are actually threatened by the liberal concept of human rights. It is a guise which becomes both a tool in political campaigning and a threat to human rights and protection of minorities. This is an important conclusion in the context of contemporary Poland, where scapegoating of sexual minorities and an almost entire ban on abortion 82 have both been used to distract public opinion from the inefficiency of the government in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic due to their polarizing potential.
Footnotes
Appendix
Descriptive Statistics of the Variables in the Model
| Variable name | M | SD | Min | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anti-LGBTQIAP resolution proposed in the municipality | 0.027 | 0.163 | 0 | 1 |
| Percentage of members of the municipality council elected from Law and Justice in 2018 | 0.164 | 0.198 | 0 | 1 |
| Percentage of male members of the municipality council | 0.702 | 0.139 | 0.2 | 1 |
| Average age of the members of the municipality council | 48.969 | 3.752 | 36.8 | 60.941 |
| Religiosity at the voivodeship level | 49.339 | 12.232 | 28 | 76 |
| Percentage of votes for the Law and Justice party list in 2015 at the municipality level | 0.426 | 0.130 | 0.0513 | 0.854 |
| Pride event in the municipality in 2019 | 0.00869 | 0.0928 | 0 | 1 |
| Logged population density at the municipality level | 4.485 | 1.184 | 1.479 | 9.0369 |
| Turnout in the 2015 election at the municipality level | 45.230 | 7.546 | 25.775 | 77.087 |
| Participation in religious organizations at the voivodeship level | 9.702 | 3.974 | 6 | 22 |
| Criminal offenses per capita at the county level | 0.0102 | 0.00419 | 0.00379 | 0.0436 |
| Education at the voivodeship level | –0.281 | 4.593 | –6.8 | 9.9 |
| Logged average household income per capita at the county level | 8.141 | 0.110 | 7.851 | 8.847 |
| Urban municipality | 0.129 | 0.335 | 0 | 1 |
| Unemployment at the county level | 8.909 | 4.183 | 1.4 | 25.7 |
Source: Own calculations.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Lee Ann Banaszak from Penn State University for her helpful comments at the early stages of development of the study during my research visit at the Washington University in St. Louis, funded by a Fulbright Senior Award. I owe ideas for some of the hypotheses tested here to Agata Stasińska from the Polish Academy of Sciences. I am particularly thankful to Jakub Gawron, the co-founder of atlasnienawisci.pl, for making the data available for analysis. I would also like to acknowledge Michał Wilkowiecki, who created the initial set of contextual data used in the analysis, Marta Olasik from the University of Łódź who helped in formulating the final conclusions, and Adam Gautier from the University of Gdańsk for his insight on the legal issues raised in this article.
Funding
The presented study was possible owing to the funding provided by the Polish National Science Center, grant number UMO-2018/31/D/HS5/01171.
